SPI 115: 9000 Unread Emails to Inbox Zero: My Executive Assistant Shares How We Did It (and How You Can Too!)

By Pat Flynn on June 28, 2014

If email is a major pain for you, then this could be your cure.

I used to love getting emails.

I saw it as a huge opportunity for me to impress a reader or listener and earn even more trust from my audience, and it worked!

As my business grew, however, so did the number of emails I received each day and I eventually got to a point where I could not keep up anymore.

What used to be inbox zero turned into inbox 100. If I could end the day with only 100 unread emails, I’d be happy.

Inbox 100 turned into inbox 200, which turned into inbox 500 and then 1000.

Occasionally, I’d find some cool email tool or read some productivity tip, which would help chip away at those numbers a little bit, but I was already beyond the point of no return.

It wasn’t too long ago that I saw I had over 9000 unread emails in my inbox.

Yes, nine-thousand.

Each new email that arrived became a constant reminder of just how many people I wasn’t able to answer, and it made me think about who I was letting down.

It also made me wonder whether or not my email client could even display 5-digits worth of unread emails, or maybe it would break or a pop-up that said “LOSER” would come on the screen at exactly 10,000.

I wasn’t going to let any of that happen.

In May, I did something I thought I would never do: I hired someone to help me manage my inbox.

Meet Jessica!

In this episode, I’d like to introduce you to Jessica, my new executive assistant.

She’s awesome.

So awesome, in fact, that in a few weeks she was able to help me go from 9000+ unread emails, to now helping me consistently reach inbox zero each day.

Jessica shares exactly how she tackled my problem, and it’s quite interesting to hear her talk about her first reactions to my inbox when I hired her.

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I hope you enjoyed meeting Jessica in today’s episode, and I hope the time you invested in listening today will help you with your own inbox problems.

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So Really, How Many Unread Emails Do You Have Right Now?

Leave a comment below and let the community know. If you don’t have very many, what’s your secret? If you do have a lot like I did, what are you going to do about it?